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This is my playground for poetry written for children with ideas and inspiration for writing your own poems. Come on in. Sit for a spell, have a cup of words to swirl around and make your own cup of poetry. I'm so glad you are here. I hope you'll find the Kingdom of Poetry a fun place to be.

Monday, December 8, 2014

Lantern Poem

copyright 2014, Joy Acey

Wildwart hogstrot aroundthe water holerun

The form of this poem is a lantern or lanterne. I like to think of it as a half cinquain. It has five lines like a cinquain, but each line has half as many syllables. So there is one syllable in the first line, then 2,3,4, and 1 syllable in each of the next lines. This form is difficult because word choice is heavily favored for one syllable words. Thus the scope of the poem is very limited. The lantern has fewer words than a haiku. Plus starting and ending with just one word lines is difficult. How do you think I did in writing this one? Now it is your turn to try.
My friend David Harrison has a poem challenge this month using the word evergreen. You can find poems using this word on his blog at www.davidlharrison.wordpress.com

So let's see if I can do this, writing a lantern using evergreen. Since evergreen is a three syllable word, I'll need to split it into two words. An evergreen is a tree, so I'll use that for my first word. Now all I need to do is fill in the middle.

Tree
growing
stretching tall
standing ever
green

This is my first draft. But looking at this, I think if I change this to a pine tree, I can do more.

Thanks, Linda. I'm still searching for the right subject to write a lantern with. So many of my safari photos won't work--lions, elephants, ostrich, zebras, gazelles, topi, --they all have too many syllables, unless I break it up like I did with the wart hog.

About Me

Joy Acey, the Princess of Poetry, has won many prizes for her poems. She published in Highlight's HIGH FIVE, and The Poetry Friday Anthologies. She is a performance artist and conducts writing workshops for children and adults. She’s hopped a freight train to ride in a boxcar over the world's second largest wooden trestle bridge. She was on a TV game show and won enough money for a trip to Australia. She has lived in England and Japan. She has walked across a volcano in Hawaii and a glacier in New Zealand. She has gone swimming with iguanas in the Galapagos and was in Ecuador during a revolution. She visited the rainforest in Peru, went on safari in Kenya and walked The Great Wall in China. Always looking for new adventures to write about, she currently lives in Kauai, Hawaii with her husband Jeffrey Frelinger, an immunologist. She has two grown sons and two fabulous daughters-in-law.